The electronic file listing technique is an information displaying technique which displays electronic file brief information of a user in a list. This technique is widely applied in various electronic file information processing systems such as an email system, an electronic file manager, etc.
Take the frequently-used email system as an example. Through an email list, a user may clearly see a general situation of his/her emails at a first glance. Then, the user may select viewing details of one of the emails. The email list generally includes key elements of the emails, also called keywords. The keywords include: sender address information, email subject, whether there is an attachment, sending time of the email, size of the email, unread/read tag, and importance and urgency degree, etc. Some email lists may also include some information or abstract information of email contents. In the email system, the user generally reviews the email list firstly, and then clicks to open an email to view the details of the email.
As to the display manner, the electronic file list is usually sorted and displayed according to the keywords in the industry. For example, in the email system, it is possible to sort and display emails according to senders, email subjects, sending time of the emails or size of the emails, etc. For each of the above sorting and displaying manners, a normal order or a reverse order may be adopted. In addition, there are multiple sorting methods such as sorting in alphabetical order, in numerical order, in Chinese strokes order, or in Chinese Pinyin order. Through sorting and displaying based on the keywords, the user may view the emails in a specific manner to find an email required. For example, FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram showing an interface of an email list sorted and displayed according to sending time in the reverse order. As shown in FIG. 1, through sorting the emails by sending time in the reverse order, it is possible to clearly see the latest email. For another example, FIG. 2 is a schematic diagram showing an interface of an email list sorted and displayed according to senders. As shown in FIG. 2, through sorting according to the senders, it is possible to see the emails sent by the same sender.
However, in the current displaying method of the electronic file list, when sorting according to a string type keyword (e.g. senders and subjects of emails), the sorting is always performed based on the whole string. It is usually firstly sorted by the first character of the string. However, the string type keyword generally includes some characters irrelevant to its headword, and these irrelevant characters are usually located at the head of the string. For example, in an email subject, characters such as “Reply”, “Re” and “Forward” usually appear at the head of the subject. The headword of the subject (i.e. the real subject) is usually behind these irrelevant characters. If the existing sorting method is adopted, the emails which have the same irrelevant characters in the head will be arranged together, whereas they actually do not have the same subject. FIG. 3 is a schematic diagram showing an interface where emails are sorted and displayed according to email subjects. As shown in FIG. 3, since some email subjects begin with “Re”, all emails whose email subjects start with “Re” are arranged together. But these emails arranged together do not have relevant subjects actually, while emails actually having relevant subjects are not arranged together. For example, emails with subjects “Re: draft document” and “draft document” are relevant, but are not arranged together, which makes the user unable to accurately find an email he/she actually cares about.
In addition, the current sorting can only be performed according to a single keyword in an alphabetical order or a numerical order. Thus, the user can designate only one keyword and only one sorting direction. For example, sorting may be performed only according to sender address information in a normal alphabetical order or a reverse alphabetical order, or only according to mailing dates in a normal numerical order or in a reverse numerical order. It is not possible to perform combined sorting according to multiple keywords, e.g., firstly according to senders and then sort emails having the same sender according to dates. In addition, current sorting method is generally fixed, e.g. email titles can be sorted in only Chinese Pinyin order but not in a Chinese stroke order. For a user used to using a stroke input method, when searching for an email among a large amount of emails, it may be difficult to find the email although the emails have been sorted because the user is not familiar with the Chinese Pinyin order.
In view of the above, the conventional method for processing and displaying electronic files simply sorts the electronic files merely according to a single keyword without considering other additional sorting related factors. Therefore, the sorting manner is too simplex. When there are a large number of electronic files, adjacent electronic files in the sorted electronic file list have poor relativity, which makes it difficult for the user to accurately find an electronic file that he/she requires.